Spotlight: Cheryl Boyce-Taylor

Hobart Book Village Festival of Women Writers congratulates Cheryl Boyce Taylor on her forthcoming collection, ARRIVAL, and welcomes her back for Festival 2017

Trinidad born and Queens bred, CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR is a poet and visual and teaching artist. The author of three previous collections of poetry, Convincing The Body,Raw Air, and Night When Moon Follows, and a recipient of a Partners in Writing grant, Boyce-Taylor served as poet-in-residence at the Caribbean Literary and Cultural Center in Brooklyn. Her poems have been anthologized in various publications including: Revolutionary Mothering, Def Poetry Jam’s Bum Rush the Page, Poetry Nation, Rogue’s Scholar, In Defense of Mumia, Bloom, Catch the Fire!!!, and Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Boyce-Taylor is the recipient of the 2015 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award.

“Arrival“, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor’s newest collection of poetry, captivates, enchants, and bedevils. From “Road to Banjul,” its magical first poem of a mysterious girl wearing a “dirty scarf,” offering a mango, smiling her “black onyx teeth,” the poet sets us up for the exquisite.” – Cheryl Clarke, author of By My Precise Haircut

“Like scent, that most powerful bearer of memory, so too is language, especially the mother tongue. Especially where mother tongue is born in a mother’s land, distant and mostly past tense. Here, Boyce-Taylor brings us to that sense of scent that travels in and forth from the innermost of the body.” – Kimiko Hahn, author Brain Fever

“Boyce-Taylor’s bold new collection slyly and directly engages topics that have preoccupied major poets for centuries—mortality, cultural heritage, blood belonging, alienation, love, and the challenge of holding nature to the page.” – Colin Channer, author of Providentialand The Girl with the Golden Shoes